An Interesting Sentence

In these forlorn regions of unknowable dreary space, this reservoir of frost and snow, where firm fields of ice, the accumulation of centuries of winters, glazed in Alpine heights above heights, surround the pole, and concentre the multiplied rigours of extreme cold.
- Francis Spufford, I May Be Some Time: Ice and the English Imagination

Americans are taught to not write like this. When I get notes, they usually tell me to shorten my sentences and simplify my prose. Yet there's something lavish and intriguing about the sentence above, something Mevillean or 17th Century. I get tired of our clipped phrases.

I don't know anything about the book, which got roundly panned on Amazon. The writer seems to have praised for other of his work, however.